News from the Northern American Southwest: Prehistory on the edge of chaos

Recent developments in the study of the prehistory of the northern Mogollon and Anasazi areas of the North American Southwest are reviewed, with emphasis on the pre-A.D. 1150 period, in an attempt to identify key empirical results and incipient interpretive directions.     

Preferences for Water Policy in the Ogallala Region of New Mexico

In the late-1970s, Congress formed the High Plains Study Project to assess and study various management and water supply strategies for the Ogallala basin. In the early-1980s, the High Plains Study Council released its findings and recommendations, which in turn stimulated numerous interpretive critiques. A decade has passed since the High Plains Study Council report, yet water management problems persist. Using data from a survey of water experts in New Mexico, we identify the determinants of support and opposition to three water management options: voluntary conservation, mandatory regulation, and water importation. Preference for water management strategies is a function of how policy is perceived (regulatory vs. distributive). Water users in the Ogallala East region of New Mexico tended to oppose mandatory regulatory policies that provide the best option for conserving ground water resources for future generations; voluntary conservation-the least effective option—enjoyed the strongest support from respondents. The findings of this research should be of interest to persons concerned with the future of the Ogallala aquifer and to students of public policy.     

Forest Service Budget Requests and Appropriations

In spite of recent arguments that significant changes are occurring in the United States Department of Agriculture's Forest Service, to date little empirical evidence exists demonstrating that this is indeed the case and whether these presumed changes are impacting upon substantive policy outcomes. Most of the current evidence available is from studies that have inferred change by measuring attitudinal change in Forest Service employees. None to date has examined changes in quantitative indicators of agency policy efforts or outcomes. In this article, we analyze trends in the budget requests of the Forest Service, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and appropriations made by Congress, to ascertain whether priorities of these actors concerning the commodity and non-commodity programs of the National Forests have changed since the passage of the National Forest Management Act. The data reveal shifting priorities for the Forest Service, USDA, and OMB. However, although the shifts have been greater for the Forest Service than for the other two agencies, they have been significantly less than the shifts in congressional appropriations. This fact suggests that Congress is changing its view of how the Forest Service should manage its lands more quickly than the Forest Service is changing itself, and that, as some have argued, Congress has been an important external agent of change concerning the agency and its policies.     

National Forest Timber Management Over the Past Decade

Timber output, the major commodity use of the National Forests, was tracked from 1981 to 1993, to assess changes that have occurred in the amount of timber offered, sold, and harvested. In addition, changes in the method of harvest used on the National Forests were examined to view trends in the management practices of the Forest Service. Although trends regarding changes in timber harvest methods varied from region to region, data on timber offered, sold, and harvested showed a dramatic decrease both nationally and in important timber-producing regions since the late 1980s. This reduction, when seen in the light of other recent studies, suggests that the Forest Service is changing the emphasis of its management practices, placing less priority on the traditional high level of timber output.     

SPECIFICATION AND ECONOMETRIC IMPROVEMENTS IN REGIONAL PORTFOLIO DIVERSIFICATION ANALYSIS

ABSTRACT. We develop an alternative specification of the regional portfolio diversification problem that explicitly incorporates important information on regional economic structure and avoids certain inconsistencies in the traditional specification with respect to what constitutes the choice set. We also implement improved econometric procedures for estimating the required parameters and provide an empirical example using 1987 data for the Colorado economy to illustrate the potential differences in sectoral allocations obtained when applying our alternative approach versus the traditional one.     

Rethinking the regional knowledge production function

The knowledge production function is a questionable device foridentifying the determinants of commercial patenting. Adaptedfrom firm level analysis, it implicitly assumes that some mechanismexists to transfer research and development inputs across institutionsto maximize invention output. Augmenting the approach with regionalstructure variables risks confounding causes and effects, becausethese conditions determine research and development in the firstplace. We contrast a knowledge production function and a regionalstructure model to identify the determinants of commercial patentingin US states in the period 2002–2004. Results show thathuman capital, specialized knowledge flows, urbanization andindustry dominance in technical advance drive commercial patenting.     

Modeling Bikeability of Urban Systems

There are characteristics of urban transportation infrastructure that are thought to influence use by bicyclists given their perceived effect on safety, comfort, and efficiency. Prior research has primarily focused on assessing the qualities of individual road segments and analysis of one or a few routes connecting pairs of origins and destinations (ODs). To address these limitations, a multicriterion shortest path framework is proposed for evaluating the characteristics of alternative routes and measuring their tradeoffs with respect to three routing objectives. A label correcting algorithm is described for identifying the complete set of routes optimizing the three objectives and metrics are developed to summarize variations in bikeability within an urban environment. The proposed methods are applied to a case study involving 27,722 urban ODs, yielding 329,931 paths optimal with respect to some combination of the three routing objectives. In particular, 77,418 paths (23.5%) were found to optimize one or more of the three individual routing objectives while 252,513 paths (76.5%) were found to optimize some tradeoff among the three routing objectives. This large number of Pareto‐optimal tradeoff paths underscores the importance of not limiting analysis of routing alternatives to one or two individual objectives.     

The Goldfields’ Sabbath: A Postsecular Analysis of Social Cohesion and Social Control on the Ballarat Goldfields, 1854

The historiography of the Sabbath reflects closely the concerns of its Sabbatarian subjects: the rise or fall in public piety and the effectiveness, or lack thereof, of evangelical moral reform and social control. In this article we step away from the question of how religious or secular goldfields society was, and instead, observe how Sunday functioned on the goldfields. In doing so we eschew a dominant narrative of religious history — secularisation — and deploy a postsecular analysis. Such an analysis reveals a remarkable degree of social cohesion: a diverse, but common, practice of rest on the Sabbath. It was only because of the universal honouring of the goldfields’ Sabbath that government troops were able to so quickly and decisively end the Eureka Stockade on Sunday, 3 December 1854.